


The Last Ones Left

by SuburbanSun



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Apocalypse, End of the World, Gen, ToT: Monster Mash, Trick or Treat 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-24 01:04:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8350117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuburbanSun/pseuds/SuburbanSun
Summary: Even after the apocalypse, a Slayer's work is never done. But maybe Buffy doesn't have to do it alone.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).



> Happy Trick or Treat! Hope you enjoy it.

Buffy woke with a start, squinting up at the early morning light filtering in through the ceiling’s row of skylights.

She stretched, yawned, then pushed off the too-high-thread-count duvet and sat up in bed. An errant throw pillow fell onto the floor, rolling across the plush rug. She reached over to the table beside the bed and pulled her Year At A Glance calendar onto her lap, opening to the current month and placing a tick mark in the corner of the day’s box in bright green ink.

It had been 47 days since she had seen another human being.

Her morning routine, since the day everything had changed, was simple. Wake up. Eat breakfast-- whatever little she could spare from her stores. Leave the relative comfort and safety of the Sunnydale Towne Center Mall (where she’d holed up a week after it had happened) and begin to walk a circle around town, a circle that grew progressively larger each day that she found no evidence of other human survivors. Slay anything that got in her way.

It was just her luck, she often thought. The world had ended, and only she and the vamps had managed to survive. More than survive, in their case.

She hopped out of the display bed she’d claimed as her own and padded out of Macy’s, toward the nearby mall bathroom.

“You could really use a makeover, Buffy,” she said, grimacing into the mirror as she spread a thin layer of rationed toothpaste onto her toothbrush. “Those ends are looking awfully splitty.” She brushed, then spat, wiping her mouth with the back of one hand. “And now you’re talking to yourself. Lovely.”

Twenty minutes later-- or so she guessed, since all electronics had stopped working shortly after the incident-- she’d wolfed down half a breakfast bar from the stash she kept under the bed and washed it down with a bottle of water. One of her last. She’d have to change up her route to find another convenience store from which to steal today.

She slung her bag over her shoulder, packing the carefully-wrapped other half of the breakfast bar, along with a few stakes and another water bottle, and slipped out of the mall’s back entrance. She secured the door behind her with a padlock pilfered from the local hardware store, tugging it twice for good measure, and set out on her patrol.

“Nobody here but us chickens,” she sing-songed to herself as she strode through a parking lot full of abandoned cars.

An hour later, thoughts of proverbial chickens had given way to thoughts of the real thing.

“I could go for a bucket of chicken,” she muttered, her fingers idly curling and uncurling around the stake she held. “Or homemade mashed potatoes and gravy. Or anything that isn’t pre-packaged and from a box.”

Just then, she saw a flash of motion out of the corner of her eye, and her entire body tensed. She ducked down, somersaulting beneath a nearby bush to get her bearings. The movement had come from her left, and she slowly crept out from the underbrush until she saw one of them. Ever since the incident, these vampires had become somehow stronger, faster, and meaner than any she’d ever known. And, apparently, impervious to the sun.

In her first few days on her own, she’d doubted they were vampires at all. But each one she’d managed to stake had turned to a familiar pile of ash.

If there were still vampires, then there were still people for them to feed from. It was that singular thought that kept Buffy awake, alert, and alive as she ticked day after day off her calendar.

The vampire whipped around suddenly, and Buffy vaulted from her crouch, shoving the creature backward with a swift kick. It staggered, but recovered, launching itself at her, gaping maw and all. She fell to the ground and rolled on her side out of its grasp, then with another sweeping kick, knocked it off its feet.

“That’ll teach you to--” she began, but trailed off. These new and improved vampires seemed to communicate only with grunts, groans and teeth, and had no appreciation for a clever quip. Kneeling over the fallen creature, she plunged the stake into its chest, but her heart wasn’t in it.

Hours later, she’d dusted three more vampires, made a wide arc around the city, and found no one. She’d stopped into an empty CVS, filling her bag with as many bottles of water as she could reasonably carry. Another day, she’d come back on the bicycle she’d rigged to a wagon. Whatever had happened (and she had many theories as to what that was, each more absurd than the last), it seemed to have interfered with combustion engines as much as with electrical components, so driving a car was out of the question.

She tore open a bag of cheesy puffs as she left the CVS, crunching on one and wiping the orange residue on the side of her jeans. “You need to eat a vegetable, Buffy. You’re going to get scurvy.” She’d started to tend a small garden in a plot behind the mall, but very little had grown so far.

She tried to keep her hopes up, though. She had to.

Toward the end of her patrol, she heard a scuffle coming from around the corner of a nearby gas station. She sidestepped over to the dingy building, edging along the wall with her stake held aloft. When she peeked around the corner, she spotted them-- four vamps, more than she’d seen together since before the change. This new breed seemed content to work alone.

These four were already fighting with each other, all snarling teeth and vicious punches. The old Buffy would have brazenly thrown herself into the fray. The new Buffy hung back. These monsters were still a mystery.

She slipped around the corner of the station and took a deep breath.

“Hey!” she called out. Four angry faces, vacant eyes and bared teeth, stared back. There was a beat, and then the brawl began.

She managed to heave one of the creatures into another, knocking them both off their feet, but by then one of the others got a good grip on her hair and tugged hard. She cried out, rearing back and headbutting the vampire in the stomach until he let go. The first two had recovered, and lunged at her. She ducked out of the way in time, only to get yanked backward by one of the other vamps. This one had a good grip, holding her tight with one gnarled hand on either bicep. She threw her weight forward and flipped him over, but she went down, too, and one of the other vamps pinned her to the gasoline-stained concrete.

She knew it wasn’t just their increased strength and speed that allowed them to get the better of her. It was her lack of it.

The vamp had her pinned, and she kneed him, hard. He barely noticed. His fangs gleamed, and in place of the bursts of adrenaline she’d felt in her former life that allowed her to scrape by in situations like this, she only felt emptiness.

Maybe this was always how it was going to end for her.

Then something struck the vampire from behind, and all she had was a mouthful of ash.

She didn’t hesitate. She flipped herself onto her feet and into fighting stance, but before she could strike with her stake, the other vampires were dusted, one, two, three, crude arrows clattering to the ground in their wake.

Buffy’s gaze snapped to the direction the arrows must have come from, but all she could see was the usual eerie stillness that permeated the new world.

She crossed the street, peered behind buildings and traipsed through the nearby woods, and found no sign of anyone. But vampires didn’t shoot other vampires with crossbows from afar, not even these newer, more cut-throat ones.

As darkness fell, she gave up for the time being. It had been too long since she’d eaten anything, anyway, and she had chicken noodle soup awaiting her, ready for her to eat, room temperature out of the can.

The mall loomed ahead, her new home, with at least a few of the comforts of her old one, and the added bonus of more supplies. As she approached the back entrance, something looked off.

The padlock. It just hung there, open. Fear trickled up her spine, along with an echo of that old adrenaline. She palmed her stake again.

The inside of the mall was cavernous and quiet. And there were so many places for a person to hide. Buffy ran through a mental list of the stores therein, dividing the building into quadrants and determining the best way to canvass it quickly. Macy’s, then Bloomingdale’s, then Nordstrom, then Dillard’s.

She slipped silently through the entrance to Macy’s from the mall floor and crept through women’s lingerie, juniors, and housewares. As she edged around a pillar toward bedding, she heard a low chuckle.

These new vampires didn’t speak, and they _definitely_ didn’t chuckle.

“Lay down your weapons, B,” called out a familiar voice. Buffy whirled around, and there she was-- Faith, lounging on the bed Buffy had claimed as her own, flipping through her Year At A Glance with a smirk on her face. “Ticking off the days? How very minimum security prison of you.”

Buffy blinked, her gaze drifting from Faith, to the crossbow that she’d propped against the bedside table.

“You--”

“Saved your life. Thank me later.” Faith tossed the calendar to the side and scooted to the edge of the bed, kicking her boots rhythmically against the side of it. “How’ve you been?”

“How have I--” Buffy began, but she choked on the words. She was flooded with anger, white and hot, and stalked forward toward Faith. “You’re alive,” she bit out.

“And kickin’.”

“And you knew where I was.”

Faith shrugged. “Not at first.”

Buffy ignored her. “How long?”

“How long, what?”

“How long have you known you weren’t the only human left? That I wasn’t?” Buffy clenched her fists at her side, torn between the urge to punch the smirk off Faith’s face and to relish in the fact that finally, she wasn’t alone.

“Relax. I didn’t _know_ , exactly.” Faith patted the bed beside her, and against her better judgment, Buffy sat, crossing her arms tightly across her chest. “I could sense something, though-- couldn’t you? I figured it was some Slayer shit, but what do I know?”

“So you decided to, what-- stalk me?”

“First I had to find you.” She looked around the department store. “You told me you used to be pretty into makeup and clothes and all that girly stuff, but I didn’t figure post-apoca-Buffy as the shopaholic type.”

Buffy paused. “It seemed like as good a place as any to set up a home base.”

“Sure,” Faith said, pulling a ruffled pink throw pillow into her lap. “It has a certain charm.”

The two women were silent for a long moment. Buffy felt her anger abate, replaced with a mixture of elation at not being the last human left alive, and a burning desire to know if there were others, too.

“Have you--” she began.

“--found anyone else? No go.” Faith looked down, picking at a loose thread on the pillow. “I came here first, but didn’t see much in the way of life anywhere out there.” She laughed sardonically. “Some gnarly vamps, though. What’s with those guys?”

Buffy shrugged. “Whatever happened had an effect on them, too, I guess.” She frowned. “I wish Giles were here.”

“I wish _anybody_ were here.”

“That makes two of us,” Buffy replied, her voice low. Forty-seven days of no one to talk to but herself had taken a toll. Silence fell again, heavy and thick around them.

After a long moment, Faith smirked again, stretching out her leg to tap Buffy’s sneaker with the toe of her boot. “But now it’s you and me against the world, B. For my money, it doesn’t get much better.”

Buffy stared down at their feet, thinking back on so many weeks of silence, and forward to the unpredictable world that lay ahead of them. Then one corner of her mouth quirked up, and she met Faith’s defiant eyes.

“I wouldn’t bet against us.”


End file.
